MusicTech4U » Blog

Someone is back!

Jim Moore — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 04:34:28 +0000

Hello! My name is James (Jim) Moore. I attended Woodbridge Senior High School and was in Music Technology class in the 2007-2008 school year. I made the 2007-2008 CD listing of the good songs from that year.

Anyways, I remembered that Mrs. Gunn set up this website not only to use it as a place for students to post their music and get feedback from their fellow students, but to also let previous students come back and help current students. I am currently in college and can help anyone that asks.

Also, I noticed that nothing seems to have been done with the site since last year. Is this site still functioning?

James

AVOID Sibeliusmusic.com

admin — Tue, 12 May 2009 15:33:39 +0000

UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

SEVERAL BUGS with the new website and it’s not worth the trouble!

Mixcraft is still amazing, but lacks some power….

admin — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:09:04 +0000

I haven’t written a blog for a while… since August! It’s time to get back on track! Earlier I wrote a blog entitled “Mixcraft is Amazing!” and yes, it is a fantastic little program. As I’ve been teaching, however, there are some issues I’ve come across that I would love to see improved. For instance, Mixcraft does not allow for video integration. Garageband does that! Additionally, it is very difficult to mix down in Mixcraft. You can’t automate effects (record changes in real time), you can’t really zoom into an audio clip as much as is really needed for some of the cuts, and the normalize function is pretty aweful. I have to take any project that needs a lot of gain boost into Sonar to really be able to mix it down. Also, you can’t send certain tracks to an effect bus. ie: there’s no way to add eq to the entire mix of drums. It would also be nice to have a master send so that I could add an effect to the entire mix of the song – ie, reverb. Otherwise you have to add that particular setting to each track individually which is not efficient. edit: See comment below – you can add master effects to Mixcraft.

We’ve had a hard time playing the keyboard into mixcraft. Our lab has Soundblaster Live! 24 bit external sound cards. This is not ideal, but it’s what we’re stuck with. For some reason, when we send the output of the MIDI track (Virtual Instrument) to the soft synth that comes with the sound card (Creative USB Sound Font Synth), we can no longer hear the keyboard. We have to get around it by using Acoustica instruments and setting the latency to it’s lower setting. Even with the lowest setting, there is still some delay, and the sound quality has a lot of pops, clicks, and sometimes doesn’t even work. Students who are adept at piano have to record into the computer using Sonar or Sibelius.

HOWEVER, I will note that for its price, Mixcraft is still amazing! I think Mixcraft is great for beginners who want to mix loops and grooves together to make their own songs and beats. For my class, however, we need something with a little more power. Maybe Acoustica could make a higher level version for a little more money. The interface is so much easier to use than Sonar, I would be willing to pay a little extra money for the features listed above!

Protected: Sibelius Music dot Com – The best website ever!

admin — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 02:00:22 +0000

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Podcasting – it WORKS!

admin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 02:57:57 +0000

I figured it out! I’m so excited. Students can now post their music on this website and their parents and friends can subscribe to their category and automatically download their new songs as they are created. How cool is that!

Here’s how to subscribe to a student’s podcast:

1. Install iTunes on your computer (mac or pc – it works on both)

2. Open iTunes and go to Advance>subscribe to podcast

3. Put the following url in there:

http://musictech4u.com/category/subcategory/?feed=podcast

where category is the main category for your child (class) and subcategory is the child’s last name.

Is this too complex? Well, no, not if I can show everyone at back to school night!

Now I have to figure out other ways for people to subscribe other than iTunes. Some people wont’ be comfortable with that.

Well this is just so exciting! Too bad schoolfusion doesn’t allow for student podcasting.

Yay!

-Shannon Gunn

ps this is actually called Category Casting since you’re only subscribing to a certain category.

1st Podcast

admin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 01:49:32 +0000

This is a test of a podcasting nature.

MixCraft is amazing!

admin — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 11:59:03 +0000

Well MixCraft is an awesome program. I will have to post that MixCraft is much easier to use than Sonar. My students picked it up so quickly at the music tech camp! Everything about MixCraft is easy to use – the virtual instruments, the loops, and I’m really impressed with the beat matching/pitch matching function. We tried to do that with AudioSnap in Sonar and it just didn’t even come close to comparing to MixCraft. I love how you can right click on anything and go to “Make into Loop” and it just works! In Sonar, if you do that with a midi track, it adds time to the end of the loop if the loop ends before or after a measure, and then it’s impossible to get rid of the extra silence. Besides, “Groove Clip Looping” is a lot more difficult to remember than “Make Into Loop” – works well for my kids. I will say that I hear a lot of distortion on the upper frequencies with Mixcraft that I never noticed before with Sonar, but I think that may be because we’re using lower quality audio loops and turning everything into an MP3. The kids can’t tell the difference. The “Save As>MP3″ feature is also very nice! In Sonar, you have to export to audio, then we open it in iTunes, and go thru a bunch of hoops to conver to MP3. It’s great they have the mp3 encoder with MixCraft – makes everything so much easier! Everyone either listens to their music on an mp3 player or the computer these days – .wav is so old-fashioned! lol Hopefully we can get it approved and on our student computers asap.

I would also like to thank David Raimono for sending us 10 free copies of Acoustica’s MixCraft to hand out to the kids. Each kid got one and now they’re going to be able to continue to compose after camp is over!

Kudos to Sibelius

admin — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 11:51:00 +0000

Well it’s time to give credit where credit is due. I have to say that I am thankful for the ease of use of Sibelius cause I think it really helped my students create their first band piece. The first day of camp, I had them copy a piano piece into the computer and then use the “explode” feature of the Arrange function to arrange it for concert band. That really gave them a sense of accomplishment at the end of the first day of camp! Then I used that to teach them how to write percussion parts. The only problem is, when you use woodblocks or some other pitched percussion, and you try to convert your score to a Scorch file, the woodblock sound turnes into a flute sound when you listen to it on the web. I’ve got to figure that out. Anyway, the third day of camp they started their own composition, and we did a lot of cutting and pasting to make it work. I will say that the nice thing about Sibelius is that you can highlight a section and move it up or down by steps using the arrow keys. The kids learned that if they moved it up 3 steps it sounded pretty. They didn’t have to understand the concept of intervals, theory, thirds, etc… just use the computer to make it sound good. I was really impressed with some of the harmonizations – see Megan Westcott or Jake Goodridge’s pieces to see an example. That was very helpful in avoiding the theory and allowing them to just write harmony. There are still things that make Sibelius difficult to teach with – namely, deleting multiple measures (which is way too complex), adding measures (you never know if it’s going to come before or after the measure you’ve selected, and if you want to add multiple measures to the end of the piece it adds it to the second to last measure), and the fact that it freezes sometimes. It was really helpful to have the software in general, though, cause I was able to bring them pretty far in a week. I don’t think they could have written a full band piece with pencil and paper in 2.5 days. Thanks!

I hate Comcast – OT

admin — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:45:23 +0000

Yeah, I know this is off topic, but I hate comcast and just had to vent. FIOS WHERE ARE YOU!!!???? I’ve been waiting patiently for 2 years!

Rick Germano blames his customer service problems on “high growth.” How is this growth possible with such a bad company? Only because they have a monopoly on high-speed internet! If you want to be able to see videos and look at pictures, DSL and that new broadband access through the electrical outlet just don’t compare. I’m writing to my congressman!

When you call Comcast, and you have someone from another country on the other line, good luck dealing with off-script problems. For instance, I want to login to comcast and see my bill. I set paperless billing two weeks ago, and now need to know how much I have to give them. So I try to login, but my email is not registered, even though I am obviously registered since I set up paperless billing and received an email saying I need to pay them. So I call them, but the guy on the other line is in India and doesn’t understand so he refers me to the internet department. Now the guy on the other line speaks English but he keeps telling me that my email is *myhusbandsname*@comcast.net. Never heard of this email, nor have we ever checked it. Either they gave us a new email and didnt’ tell us, or they are confused between an email we use to check our balance, and the email they give us when we sign up with them. How do you explain this to a customer service rep? A script just ain’t cuttin’ it!!!!

Lord I hate Comcast!

I was out of internet for two days last week, due to an “outage” in my area. How is that possible, when I can see about 10 wireless networks that are working from my neighbors? (ha ha) I’m sure at least one of those has comcast!

I will send an email of thanksgiving when FIOS comes around.

Sorry So Negative but I really had to vent!

Shannon

Upgrade to Sibelius 5 or buy Finale?

admin — Sun, 25 May 2008 22:30:15 +0000

Sibelius 3 is driving me crazy! How did they get away with writing this software? A short list of pet peeves:

There’s no playback window (ok, so that’s fixed with Sib 4)
Give me scroll bars, please!! (fixed with Sib 5 I hear???) Every time I try to grab music to move from one page to another I accidently grab a stave and elongate a measure by about 4 inches. oops!
There’s no way to move from the end to the beginning without having to scroll through the whole song (is there a shortcut I don’t know about?)
Page layout view is difficult to use.
When I put in an expression message for dynamics, it is automatically placed above the staff rather than below. Who’s ever read music with the dynamics above the staff? edit: doh! vocal scores!
Difficult to grab things. I can click 5 times to try to select something, and it will select the thing next to it, but never the actual text I want! So frustrating! (Finale makes this easier by limiting what you can select based on what tool you are in)
It is so annoying to accidently write music while I’m experimenting on the keyboard. I can press esc but that doesn’t always work the first time. (Once again Finale makes this easier by limiting what I can do based on what tool I am in)
Takes 20 seconds to close

So why did I buy Sibelius? Cause I was a poor grad student, and at the time, it was cheaper than Finale. I figured I’d get a good software program and just make it work if I didn’t like it. Well now I have a job and I’m ready to invest in something that will make my life easier, not more difficult! But this post would not be complete without listing the good things about Sibelius 3…

The arrange function – allows me to “explode” a piano reduction into 4 part harmony with ease! (does Finale do this?)
I can filter the top note of a piano part and copy it and paste it into a trumpet (or other part)
The nicest thing about Sib 3 is that when you click on a note and press Play, it starts playback right at that note. In Sib 4 you have to move the scroll bar (ugh!) to get where you want. I can’t seem to manage that real well.

So what do you think? Sibelius 5 or Finale?